The emergence of Islamist movements and religious symbolic repertoires in the aftermath of the Tunisian revolution has elicited the political, moral, and practical contestation of women's right to abortion. While, after several heated debates, the law was eventually not modified, several practitioners working in government family planning clinics have changed their behaviour preventing women getting abortions. Pre-existing state and medical logics, political uncertainties, and new religious and moralising discourses have determined abortion practices in the government health-care facilities generating unequal treatments according to women's marital status, class, and education. This paper will investigate the multiple logics affecting abortion practices in post-revolutionary Tunisia, focusing on the dissonant logics mobilised by health-care professionals as well as structural socioeconomic factors.
In highly industrialised societies, risk shapes representations and practices surrounding childbirth. However, few studies examine the impact of the transnational diffusion of risk in medium and low income societies, where, despite the adoption of biomedical protocols on an institutional level, women and birth attendants often seem to follow different rationales in their practices. In this article, we are interested in the various components of the notion of risk, which shall be understood and examined in relation to specific socioeconomic , political and cultural configurations. Drawing on two ethnographic studies conducted, respectively, in a Swiss university hospital and in three Jordanian government hospitals, we investigate how surveillance and medical interventions are deployed in pregnancy and childbirth in unequally structured health systems and describe negotiations and appropriations surrounding this management. These two contrasting cultural, socioeconomic and health 'system' contexts reveal important differences in the way birth attendants and women consider the notion of risk in childbirth in that it is seldom present in clinicians' and women's discourses and practices in Jordan, whereas it plays a pertinent role in Switzerland. We argue that the heterogeneous configurations of risk mobilised by the participants in these studies reveal that dissimilar histories in terms of medical institutions and health care service provisions, political regimes, economic conditions, and social configurations shape the cultural and techno-medical arrangements of the institutions we studied. Comparing our Jordanian and Swiss ethnographies, we show that the mobilisation of biomedical risk does not happen in a vacuum but rather intertwines with specific social arrangements, eliciting resistance and adaptation that fashion the discourses and behaviours of birth attendants and pregnant women.
Active management of labor (AML) is an obstetric technology developed in Ireland in the 1970s to accelerate labor in nulliparous women. This technology achieved rapid success in Great Britain and in English-speaking countries outside America, which adopted it before many other states around the world. In this article, I explore AML's technical and social characteristics when it was first designed, and then examine its local inflections in a Jordanian and a Swiss maternity hospital to shed light on the ways its transnational circulation modifies its script. I argue that its application is shaped by local material constraints and specific sociocultural configurations, gender regimes, and hospital cultures. Finally, I make a comparative analysis of AML practices in these two settings and in the foundational textbook to disentangle the technical and sociocultural components modeling its local applications.
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